Wednesday, September 21, 2022

The Volkswanderung into Britannia-Inferior

HBDChick points to Gretzinger et al. including Stephan Schiffels. Summaries at Science and at Schiffels' own Twitter.

Here the Venerable Bede is affirmed as flagging post-Roman pre-Viking Britain as taking on a lot of migrants. These migrants would include female migrants. So far, no argument from me. Until we get further west, out to "Wessex" and to the Welsh Marches and to literal Cumbria; there I might take a stand, as perhaps my ancestors did.

We're not quite there yet as defining what a "Jute" was. Bede and the Anglosaxon Chronicle(s) said they're the tribes who settled Kent. But... the Chronicles depended upon Bede, or at least upon the sources he had, which also trended eighth-century. The genes in the southeast point more to Franks and, indeed, there's a Merovingian influence in Norfolk-Suffolk late-sixth-century aristocracy. Raedwald was of the Angles. Kent and the East-Saxons slipped back into paganism in his time, thus seceding from the Franks.

In that respect I'd not yet call out Frankish genes as being "Norman". Especially when you consider (A) Normans were actually Viking-descended and (B) Bill the Bastard had called in many many Bretons, who - by their name - could boast Devonese and Cornish ancestry, by conquest claiming their homecoming. The "Franks" in Dark Age southeast Britain, if by that we mean Gaulish and/or inland-Germanic, look to be centuries earlier than 1066. Or a century later: Angevin/Plantagenet-era, when the kings and nobles became more French, in culture and in marriage.

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